Grain direction?Was the top dead flat before you started with the smoother?You want to be taking a thou off.Are the corners of the iron 90 degrees?Is the frog tuned?How large do you have the mouth set?

I have a Veritas plane that works well, but it has a feature that many older planes do not… an adjustable throat. You slide the plate very close to the blade to limit tearout.

Truth be told, for large tabletops I take them to a local woodworking shop with a 50” drum sander. For a nominal cost, I smile as the monstrous sander yields a perfectly flat top. No tearout, no gouges, just perfect.

For smaller coffee tables, and dresser tops I use a different approach. I glue up pairs of boards. Then I plane down these planks while they still fit in my planer. Then I will glue the two planks together. That way, I only have one glue line to sand flush.

Set the chipbreaker very close to the edge for cherry, like1/32” back. The chipbreaker should be polished on topand the bottom of the front edge flattened so it bears evenly against the iron.

For smoothing, set the mouth fine. Camber the irona bit and set it for a fine cut.

You still have to watch the grain direction and cherryis not one of the easier woods to work with hand planes.You’ll need to scrape here and there, perhaps a lot.

When you encounter an area where the grain reverses,mark the surface with a pencil so you can see wherethe reversal is. This way you can move on and dosome more work going in direction A. Then, afteryou’ve got some satisfactory work done in directionA, go back and plane in direction B. Be careful to stop your strokes so you don’t tear up direction A areas you’ve already planed. Some areas will still be tricky,but most of the surface should be workable witha plane this way.

You can also “back bevel” the iron by 5 degrees and this will raise the effective pitch of the planeto 50 degrees, resulting in a more scraping cutthat handles wiley grain better.

Your so right Carl. Great web site. Once again my faith is restored in the lowly hand plane. Patience and perseverance.
Dave – I am watching grain direction, but with Cherry it’s hard for me to tell. I did grind the corners down which helped a lot.
Smitty – I’m heading to your blog for more lessons.
Purplev – I’m having pretty fair luck with a card scraper, but need to flatten the tops more before I can use the scraper.
Stumpy – Silly man, you can’t plane concrete with a wood plane. Besides, concrete is what I’m using to sharpen the blades.
Don – My Stanley #6 is working pretty good. I think I just need to hone the blade along with my technic.

After all the good advice, I just encourage you to persevere. Hand planes are kind of like learning to ride a bike- there is a large learning curve in the beginning. If you can push past it, you’ll be cruising. And you’ll be very glad you did.

-- "At the end of the day, try and make it beautiful....because the world is full of ugly." Konrad Sauer